The 5:2 Financial diet (spend for two days a week, don’t spend for five)

If you plan well, you can do your shopping for necessities once a week, and ration your consumption over the week. This can be for food, general shopping and social spending. Spending a few days a week not spending any money is great practice of discipline to hep you save and invest. Much like food and alcohol, small regular consumption often leads to larger addictions. See spending money as a reward not a daily action. Work out a budgeted weekly spend, spend it over 2 of the seven days and each week move the surplus into your savings account so you can’t touch it.

Save between 50 and 75% of your pay check

This may seem hard at first. If you start by saving the maximum % of your pay check as you can, even if it is only 10%, you can build from there. As you adjust to a more controlled, budgeted lifestyle, you’ll find you free even more money up. If you make your own lunch and don’t buy £4 coffees twice a day, you can save around £90 a week. Each pay rise you get can all be put into your savings, avoiding the trap of spending more than you earn. Or save all your part time/second income. I went from 120% spending vs. earning when I was in debt, to less than 20% in a 5 year time frame with small, simple changes that compound over time. £90 a week is £23,400 in 5 years.

Trend spot investment opportunities

In my new book “Money” I list the 7 levels of financial freedoms. Level one of managing money is getting out of debt. Level 2 is saving. Level 3 is investing. The golden rules of investing are buy low and hold for the long term. All markets move in cycles so watch for trends and anti-trends. What is out of favour and therefore under-priced? Be a contrarian and wait while everyone is getting too late into highly/over-priced investments like the stock market and Bitcoin and wait until they drop or crash. The best trends are often long term secure assets and stocks that are having short term issues and therefore under-priced but likely to recover.

Take risks (e.g. set up a business)

My mantra that I end every podcast with is “If you don’t risk anything you risk everything”. Take calculated risks that seem risky but have the downside covered. Set up a part time business from home like eCommerce where you have no premises, stock or overhead and can manage it from your phone of Laptop anywhere in the world. Create an information product packaging your knowledge and selling it as books, audios and online courses, taking risks perceived by others but actually risking little capital and only time. This also teaches you that what you worry about mostly does not come about and to take bigger risks that have bigger rewards.

Don’t buy clothes, gadgets or fripperies for a year

Most clothes and gadgets are liabilities that go down in value over time. Most also have a very short lifespan. Rotate your clothes and wear some you haven’t for a while as if they are new. Only upgrade your phone and Laptop when the brand new model is out, not the ’S’ or the halfway model that only has minor improvements. Wait until there are sample or clearance sales and buy second hand or sale items and not new. Buy your car at the oldest year of the newest model so that most of the depreciation has happened. To become wealthy you need discipline and to avoid emotional spending such as impatience, desiring the new shiny thing and retail therapy.

If you want to save and make more money, you need to learn more about money. New global best-seller “Money” – know more, make more, give more, by author and multi-millionaire Rob Moore, is out now on Audible – tiny.cc/MoneyBook